ASP-IDSA Young Investigator Award in Geriatrics

Current Award Winner

 David van Duin, MD, PhD, a staff physician in the Infectious Diseases Department at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, is the recipient of the 2012 Association of Specialty Professors-IDSA Young Investigator Award in Geriatrics. This award provides support to infectious diseases faculty within the first four years of appointment who are interested in pursuing a career in geriatric medicine aspects of the subspecialty. Recipients of this award must develop and implement a basic, clinical, or health services research project encompassing the geriatric aspects of infectious diseases.

Dr. van Duin earned his medical degree from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands in 1999. In 2007, he was awarded a doctor of philosophy degree in investigative medicine from Yale University. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Yale School of Medicine and had his residency at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Jacobi Medical Center.

Dr. van Duin's research focuses on investigating the interactions between aging, infections, and the immune system. He discovered that TLR1/2 function and CD80 up-regulation are severely impaired in monocytes of older adults. The latter finding predicted subsequent responses to influenza vaccination, one of the most important vaccines in the aging population. In other research, he described a cohort of 350 patients with histoplamosis in the context of age at presentation. In collaboration with Dr. Robert Bonomo of the Cleveland VA Medical Center, he is leading a multi-center prospective study looking at carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, which are often found in long-term care settings and are an important threat to older adults.

For his current proposal, Dr. van Duin will examine the behavior of Th17 T cells in older adults, specifically in the setting of Candida colonization and infection. Th17 T cells are a novel subpopulation of T cells whose role in health and disease is just beginning to be explored. Dr. van Duin will also work with Dr. Mahmoud Ghannoum of Case Western Reserve University to evaluate the mycobiome in older adults. Understanding the details of the aging immune response may lead to additional interventions to lessen the burden of disease.

 Past ASP-IDSA Young Investigator Award Recipients